The Future of Fashion Technology: AI, Branding & Live Shopping Trends | Anya Cheng

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Today's episode was a fun one.

Talk to Anya Chang.

She is the founder of Taylor.style, talking about how they're using AI to help you style your wardrobe.

And again, hey, this is the Netflix of wardrobe wearing online.

What does that mean?

It means ultimately you rent before you own.

You don't even have to buy it.

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No laundry, stylish clothes, saving time.

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All that and more.

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We have those unique data.

We put it together and we buy two companies their styling information from their 10 years operations.

Then we layer on top of larger languaging model.

So as they grow, we also grow, but we always one step ahead.

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What's up, guys?

Welcome to Right About Now.

We're here to help you get right now.

Hey, we can talk about what you should have done.

We can talk about what you should do.

We need to talk about right now.

You know what's right now?

It's AI.

It's lots of it.

It's every day.

It's in front of us.

But ultimately, hey, I like to look good.

It's hey, my style, my image.

That's why I go straight to the source.

It is Anya Chang.

She is the founder and CEO of Taylor.

She's making everybody look good.

What's up, Anya?

Aloholi, it's Anya from Taylor AI.

We use AI to pick clothes for you.

In the past, only celebrity has human stylus.

Nowadays with AI, everybody has your personal stylus in your fingertips.

But in addition, we send people real clothes for you to wear for a couple days, couple weeks, no more.

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Shopping, no more laundry after this rental service.

Before starting a company, I helped you with Facebook, Instagram, and shopping for Meta, had a product for eBay, also senior director at McDonald's, run their food delivery business.

When you are ordering McDonald's, you put on your phone.

That was my product, and helped Target to build their tech office here in Silicon Valley.

Excited to be here today.

You really are 40 under 40.

I mean, I tell you what, girls in tech, 40 under 40.

She's got it going on you've been around the blog

yeah and I'm also teaching at Northwestern University I teach marketing and product management there so excited to share some examples in case studies.

Anyo I want to talk mainly in our short time together about what you're doing with Taylor how you've grown that business the future of all AI is related to your business but let's at least because you do have an impressive background you've worked Facebook you just named the who's who of some tech brands and otherwise what's the one thing that our audience could know about you and what you learned working at some of those giants and maybe one of the biggest takeaways that then led you to your own path?

I think one thing is the reason that I started a company was that when I was working for big tech companies before, I was a female leader for a big tech company.

I came from data scientists and marketing background, but I did do large technology teams.

So I always feel a little bit impossible syndrome.

Am I ready for the day?

I'm sure many people like me who have a dream feel that sometimes.

I start feeling like maybe at least I need to look great, dressed up looks presentable when i'm freaking out nobody will find out i started using some subscription boxes like stitch fix and some other subscription boxes out there but you all have to buy they do style you but once it's in juler box within few days you have to decide if you're going to buy it's almost like Netflix show versus buying a DVD of home alone if you're watching Netflix show you don't have to decide right you watch for three minutes you don't like it move on who cares it's subscription tons of options out there versus buying a dvd you have to really shore and i didn't like the pressure of a commitment but i started renting clothes company like newly 500 million revenue in just five years or backed by urban outfitter rental runway or more lots of women's rental company all of them require me to pick hundreds of thousands of garments pick pick pick spend two hours and it was a hard moment for me that I realized I do not like browsing and shopping and I don't know fashion.

I don't have have strong fashion sense I don't know what to pick and most of fashion companies seem to have the design for people who are into fashion not for people like me just want to get ready for the day and be successful and that's what Taylor was for but for your questions on what did I learn from big tech company that end up apply here I think one thing that I learned really important in big tech company is always focus on finding the right problem versus only focus on figuring out the solution.

Because when you are fixing a wrong problem, no matter how great your solution is, it's going to to be wrong.

For example, where Target, they thought of the one problem, which is mom, when they go to store, sometimes they forget one thing.

Yes, how about we build something called shopping list?

You list the shopping list, you go to the store, the app becomes an in-store GPS.

Turn right, turn left, never forget one thing from the store.

The launcher feature spends six months, lots of money geo-fencing all of the products in the locations in different stores.

Eventually, nobody uses it.

Why?

Moms, they are going to the store to get lost.

They like to wander around the store.

And they have been in the store for 10 years.

They said they get away from their noisy kids.

They want to be lost in the store so they can buy something and spend time.

It's their meantime.

Solving the right problem is extremely important.

And that's why we found that these easy men who are not into fashion, but single guy, salespeople, recruiter, faster professor, really don't care about fashion but need to look good.

And we are solving the problem to help them to be more successful.

Smart.

Gotta solve the right problem.

It starts there.

Anya, before I turn a little bit more to Taylor and some of the specific you got things you guys are doing with AI, one question for someone as astute as yourself on the marketing side.

We're in this world now, and obviously, sales is everything for a company.

Where do you fall on the performance marketing versus branding?

Do people care about brands anymore?

Is it just about, hey, you solved my problem, you got a product, boom, don't really care about the brand.

For someone like yourself that's in tech, I could easily see you falling into solution sale.

Does brand still have a place?

Yeah, I truly believe so.

example was my old company Sears Sears as when we were at Sears Kmart our website actually

faster than Amazon the feature the performance every single website content 10 years ago is actually personalized not everybody see the same website not everybody see the same email not everybody see the same ad 15 10 years ago Sears was more cutting edge than eBay.

Most people don't believe so, but when I joined eBay, I realized so.

it's so true however people don't like the brand they never really attach to it somehow it's the great amazing website we have some product but then when you don't have a brand people don't have relevancy to you right so for example what we found that in our model people are not really just buying clothes they are buying the chance to succeed what we say manage a rental subscription nobody care but when i say hey i can help you to dress up for your day night which you don't have to worry about your day night just focus on a conversation.

People buy the service, people use your service.

And I can tell you at Meta, at one point, they actually do blind testing, they sell the glasses, and at one point, they just put down the hider glasses, they put like oculars versus some other brands on Apple's and some others.

We see people actually choose differently.

I do think that it both are equally important.

We know the marketing funnel.

You don't have a consideration, there's no performance marketing needed.

However, it's also if you only have branding, but you don't have performance marketing, you can never convert those awareness in consideration.

We recently won the American Marketing Association Award of Excellence in Marketing by doing very well on ChatGPT.

Nowadays, people say performance marketing more and more get into like ChatGPT SEO versus Google SEO because more people asking questions there.

How we do it is that we use human and machines in a loop and exercise.

We start with identifying the user journey, why people search for something even on ChatGPT, identify the question people will ask.

ask we have human to write down the overall outline we use ai to generating content from there our human style is revising the content with their point of view and then we when we send the customers outfit with a styling note customer provide feedback put your feedback into the the notes with the content and then those content generated to automatically to the website which will get more traffic coming in from chat gpt and as regular seo and it become an automatic flywheel so that we want the award we got 10 10,000 impressions for free from there.

But I truly still believe brand is important.

So does the performance marketing.

Woman after my own heart talking about the purchase funnel here.

I love talking about purchase funnel.

You got awareness, consideration, intent, and then you got to make a purchase.

Yo, man,

heart beating.

I'm a marketer hard on it.

I will say, it's really smart what you're doing because people are moving from SEO.

Hey, all about all this list.

No, just give me the answer.

It's about answers.

It's about solving the problem.

It does lead to a fascinating discussion is when there's only one answer,

what happens to SEO?

We'll let someone else smarter than me solve that one.

Anya, you just talked a little bit how you're using AI.

It's been at the core of the business, I take it, since day one, from what I heard and what you described.

What's been the biggest learning lesson being on this cutting edge of AI?

Era of AI is very different from the era of algorithm.

If you look at last generation, Google, it's a black box of algorithm.

What's rent high is important.

But nowadays, unless you are elon musk mark zagburst otherwise most of you are going to use open ai the chat gpt's parent companies or elon musk's ais or google's ai etc so nobody is going to build your own algorithm means what means data is way more valuable nowadays building ai is easy it's like building website 20 years ago you need a whole bunch of engineer nowadays you need ten dollars on shopify you're done nowadays the key things is you have your unique data so you can bring your data layer on top of whatever large language model the ilama say marks that review at taylor we know customers true preference why if you go to a store macy's in norstroms or amazon's you buy or spy don't buy something largely because of price your decision is polluted by the price but when you watch your netflix show the show is not on this gown you watch which show is you truly like it the same thing for our membership model we pay people pay $100 per month.

Whatever the clothes they pick along with our AI, our AI actually pick for them.

But when they work together, I'm doing deciding that it's what they truly like.

We also get feedback every other week because the customer wanting to make sure their next stream is better.

Versus in the past, when I'm working for Target, with eBay, people never give feedback unless it's one star and they're so pissed off about that, right?

And we all don't know future.

AI don't know the future.

AI know the past.

But we are working with 300 fashion brands.

They are designing something for the future.

Next year's trend.

This year, the most popular color is mocha, like not brown, mocha, the mocha color.

But what's the next year's color?

They are designing that.

They are deciding that.

And we also have human stylists and they have no heart.

Why you don't just search?

Why you why celebrities still use human style list?

Because they are still better.

We have those unique data.

We put it together and we buy two companies their styling information from their 10 years operations.

Then we layer on top of larger languaging model.

Once they grow, we also grow, but we always one step ahead.

If you are a small business or starting a company, now is your time because building AI is easy.

All you need is unique defensive data.

For example, my friend is a doctor.

He's a dentist.

All he does is you just have one

practice for 15 years.

But he has those images for 15 years with different teeth issue.

So now he's building his AI to detect teeth issue because he has those image, those unique data that no one else has.

Think about that.

And then for your previous questions on the SEO for ChatGPT, one thing you should know is that in the past for Google, they only consider structured data, means copies.

Remember an image, like Google doesn't read Ryan's image, but we have to write Ryan right about now show behind the image so that Google can read.

However, nowadays AI, they read both.

They read image, they read videos, they read both.

Multimedia become a lot more important.

User-generated content become a lot more important.

And that's the difference between SEO nowadays on ChGP versus before.

That's good.

Hey, that means I'm out there, man.

I got thousands of episodes and highlight clips and smart people like Anya coming on the show telling us all the good stuff.

Hey, we're covered, Anya.

We're good.

Exactly.

Walk me through.

I'm a busy executive.

My wardrobe sucks.

Not mine.

Mine's stylish because I got things like Taylor and other things that I use.

But talk to me what that process looks like.

Yeah, our customers, they signed up just like Netflix show.

They signed up for a membership, $79 or $98, however program they picks.

So then they can't get to wear like 10 clothes per month, for example.

So they start with a simple style quiz.

How all AI know about you?

We ask you some questions.

We do ask you your high and weight, which we don't always use because a lot of customers they think they are taller and thinner.

They will put, I am definitely size median no no no go to your closet pick your favorite outfit oh my god when did I become a size electron large yes you are

I'm 6'5 265 so believe me I know

no mediums in the closet for me that's right so we do also ask them to go to their closet look at their favorite outfit what size is it and then most important question we ask is your purpose because our customers they don't care about looking good they care about looking good so that they get a job get a day or close a deal or their show number one every single day they want to get five million followers like following and traffic every single episode that's why they care they care about success no matter what's their definition of success some people success means more time with their kids so then they don't need to worry about their farmers outfit a farm market outfit some people success means they close a deal won a 10 million dollar deal with this new client our job is to make sure we dressed up to success to project the best image that you want and then from there we ask you to upload a few pictures you like this like certain item and if you like we get a 15 minutes consultation call with human stylist our human stylist will get on zoom call and then we'll talk with you you can show the closet your body or whatever thing you want to show from there we send you the first treatment seven item for example you already missed a match to multiple outfit that fit with your upcoming schedule and then from there, if you wear after you wear for whole weeks, if you're traveling, give it back to the hotel lobby with the return envelope that's prepaid.

You go home without doing any laundry.

When you get home, the next day the new clothes has arrived.

So no more shopping, no more laundry like your Netflix show.

Subscribe, you can watch a lot of things.

So you get to try it, you don't have to buy it, and you get to trade in and out the clothes that you want.

And do you get the option to keep it or is it just renting no matter what?

You get the option to keep it.

And the good thing is that for most of busy men, they never go to a dress store.

So we all know sustainability, buying second-hand squads and exact traffic, but nobody have those times.

So in this model, after you wear it for a few weeks, usually it's quite on discounts, 10, 20, 50, 70% off.

So then most people just buy it.

They looks like still very new, just like your airport rental car.

They tend to be very, very new.

Average renting three times is already sold.

And we partner with over a hundred brands marine layer johnson murphy bonobos all kind of brand you name it for both the most famous american brand but also we source globally best brand in italy best brand in the netherlands in uk in japan so you get those amazing brands come here and then you can try i can tell you most of our customers think i will never wear pink and our stylist how about this i give you a bonus item for free try this one and they were like okay this is great can i buy two of that so many of us never know our true style because we have been wearing the same thing again and again in the last 10 years real hey real men wear pink i like it i love this because you get to try stuff you just hit the nail on the head you try stuff that maybe you wouldn't feel comfortable buying and you know you're not stuck if you don't like it but a lot of times it forces you into trying something a little different and you can sample it and then you get to at least expand your horizons of what you might wear.

I'm a a black t-shirt guy.

I come back to the black v-neck a lot, but I've had to expand the palette.

My wife's like, all right, black v-necks, it's time to take a little break.

And gotta have a little splash of color.

That's right, that's right.

Most of the time, they don't.

We ask, what color do you usually wear?

Blue.

Everybody is blue, right?

So, but this year, the famous color is mocha.

And last year, the famous color was a red wine.

Do you have those color?

If not, check it out.

These are still very, very trendy.

And

you don't have to know.

Our human stylists without AI will pair for you.

We even told you, okay, what shoes you should pair with, what bells you should pair with, and that's where we are expanding into as well.

Our customer users are more like executive assistant, concierge service, or more like the gadget guy behind superhero in those movies.

So you ask questions about branding and what we are really selling.

I think we are not really just selling clothes.

We are selling the peace of mind.

the convenience, the chance to succeed, and that's what our customers are really buying for.

That makes a lot of sense.

What about like, okay, tuxedos or I think sometimes you think of rentals and you think of suits or something.

Is this a service to use for those types of single one-off events?

No, not at all.

Our customers, we don't have suits, we don't have tuxedos because most people don't wear that nowadays.

We have blazers,

sport coats, we have t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters, and all kinds of things that for everyday wear.

Our mission is to help people get ready for their days.

So our customer user is more like your Netflix show.

In the old time, you buy the DVD once a year, like, okay, holiday, we will do this.

But nowadays, you open your Netflix show, you become everyday.

In the old time, you only rent the car once a year when you go on the road trip with your family.

Nowadays, you open Ubers and live your renting car every single day.

With the share economy, it's getting a lot more

getting into everyday life.

And also, we partner with fashion brands from all over the world.

So, instead of burning those inventory, today 30% of the clothes go directly from factory to them field generating 10 of carbon emissions 20 of polluting water fashion is the most polluted industry in the world instead of burning those inventory we also help them to find a new outlet and also a lot of brands send us their latest collections over a hundred brands we partner with a lot of them they will be sending testing their latest collections through the platform then they get feedback right away then they can decide how to produce next year while customer on the one hand helping to solve the environmental issue on the other hand become the guinea pig to try the latest collections that's not even out there maybe you are wearing the most trendy shirt for next year hey win-win well to wrap up here on ya i got a question for you about a trend that's been taken off especially in it's the late states been overseas a lot more just want your perspective live shopping where does anya fall on this are you a proponent do you think this is a trend that's going to expand i personally do, but I'd love to know someone like yourself, what you think about what's happening in the live shopping space.

You're asking the right person because I view live shopping for Meta.

So

I view live shopping, Instagram, Facebook shopping.

I helped to build a team.

I actually built a live shopping feature for Meta.

I think for sure it's going to be expanding.

Most of the people ask me the question differently, though.

They say, I ask me why it's so slow in the U.S.

As you know, it's been super popular in China, Southeast Asia, most of the countries there.

Live shopping is their everyday life.

And every year I heard VC investors come to me and say, Anya, can you due diligence in this company?

We really think that it's going to blow up next year.

Why?

But then after a few years, still not yet, like not everywhere yet.

I still truly believe it will be very, very popular.

But the reason why it haven't been, I think many reasons.

Number one, I think in the US, we tend to be a little bit more fragmented in terms of platform, like commerce platform or or payment platform most of people don't feel comfortable giving facebook your credit card while in china southeast asia many of those companies their platform for payment is exactly the same platform for their e-commerce that's where they shop where they do the payment where they book appointment for doctor appointments their super app does all of those things while here we feel like amazon is amazon ebay is ebay instagram and google map they are all separate function customer behavior takes a while on being emerged.

The other thing is, I think, is also because of talents.

If you look at those countries that have very strong live shopping, their engineers, the same thing, they are engineers who build payments and shopping are the same people who build chat conversations.

While in the US, I can tell you a lot of Google engineers or Facebook engineer in their entire life, they never built anything.

that was a physical product.

Live chattings or other stuff, whatever, Google Map, there's no physical product.

So it's very different from the engineer who works in Amazon.

They need to consider the warehouse, the shipping time, the physical product, which is a very, very different user experience, technology, collecting taxes, collect doing returns, make sure you're right on time, win lifetime in the offline environment.

So also talents are very, very different.

However, despite those things, I still super believe that either commerce company, like Amazon, those companies will incorporate a lot more social into it.

I also do believe social company Meta, Instagram and TikTok will still incorporate a lot more commerce in order to pull their attribution that they actually make an impact for the sales for advertisers.

And I also still do believe there will be standalone commerce, social commerce platform emerge.

Today you see, like, for example, Sephora, I do see a lot of startup doing just Sephora type of company, but entire side is native from social commerce with social contents over there.

So I truly believe this is still the future.

Yes, whatnot's taken off.

I'll tell you where it's taking off, and there's no looking back, and that's trading cards and collectibles.

Yes, I have a business in that.

And let me tell you, people are hook, line, and sinker on live shopping.

We'll see maybe in Taylor's future.

Who never knows?

But ultimately, they're already breaking the mold using AI.

Taylor, where can everybody keep up with you and Taylor and learn more?

If you are investors, if you are suppliers and with talents, we'll partner with dating site, fitness center, career center, shows who need outfits, feel free to reach out to me.

I'm Anya, A-N-Y-A at tailor.ai.

That's T-A-E-L-O-R.ai.

Or if you are just customers who want to get ready for your day, no more shopping or laundry always looks great.

Have human and AI stylists to style you, then go on tailor.style.

That's T-A-E-L-O-R dot S-T-Y-L-E, tailor.style.

use a code podcast25 podcast25 to get 25% off your first month or use a go on the gift card to go in podcast gift to get 10% off of gift card holidays around the corner best gift is saving time love it podcast 25 and podcast was that gift that's right there it is we got those we'll have those in the show notes for everyone to take advantage of Anya it's a pleasure to meet you.

Nice meeting you and thanks everyone.

Would you all have been very successful and saving time?

No more laundry.

Who says, Yeah, I cannot do your laundry?

This is Anya from Taylor.style.

Thank you.

Hey, guys, you know to find us at ryanisright.com.

We'll find highlight clips, show notes, and all the links that Anya so graciously shared for savings on Taylor.

You know, it's always here, it's always right, it's always now.

We'll see you next time.

This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

Thanks for listening.

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